AlumDeck vs Graduway
Graduway, now part of Gravyty, is a hosted alumni engagement platform sold to institutions on a subscription. AlumDeck is software you install on your own hosting for $49 once. One of them has years of institutions behind it. The other one is us, and this page says so.
Graduway does not publish a price. ITQlick scores its pricing transparency 4 out of 10, which is the most concrete public figure we can point at.
What Graduway is genuinely better at
We are the new product in this comparison. That is a real disadvantage and pretending otherwise would make everything else on this page less believable.
It has customers you can ring up
Graduway has been sold to institutions for years, which means there are alumni directors who have run it through a full giving cycle and will tell you what it was like. AlumDeck has no customers yet. We will not be inventing testimonials, logos or star ratings to cover that, so if references are part of your evaluation, we currently fail that test.
One supplier, if you already buy from that group
Graduway sits inside Gravyty, a larger advancement software business. If your institution already holds a contract there, adding another product from the same supplier means one relationship, one invoice and one support route. That is worth something real to a finance office, and we cannot match it.
The vendor carries the operational load
Hosting, uptime, patching, backups and capacity planning are all included in a subscription. With AlumDeck every one of those becomes yours. If your IT department is already at capacity, that transfer of work is not a technicality, it is the whole decision.
Side by side
Published figures where a figure exists, and clearly labelled third-party scores where it does not.
| AlumDeck | Graduway | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $49, one time, per installation | No public price. Quoted per institution |
| Price published openly | Yes | No |
| Independent transparency score | Not rated, but the number is on the pricing page | ITQlick rates pricing transparency 4 out of 10 |
| Members included | Unlimited, no per-record fee | Not published |
| Where alumni data sits | Your server, your jurisdiction | The vendor's cloud |
| Who runs the hosting | You do | The vendor does |
| Who applies security patches | You do | The vendor does |
| Support model | Email, included for twelve months, renewal optional | Included for the term of the subscription |
| Time to a working site | An afternoon, self-serve, no sales call | A demo, a quote, then an implementation |
| Institutions you can take a reference from | No | Yes |
| Who it actually suits | Schools, colleges and associations without a software budget, with someone able to look after hosting | Institutions with an advancement team, procurement and a recurring budget line |
Graduway does not publish pricing, so there is no figure for us to quote and we will not estimate one. The transparency score is ITQlick's, not ours. The AlumDeck column is published in full on our pricing page.
The three-way split, without the marketing
AlumDeck gives you
- A price you can read without a sales call
- Unlimited members, users and admins
- Every module in one licence, no add-on store
- Alumni data in your own database and country
- Software that keeps working after the licence year ends
In exchange you take on
- Hosting, and the bill for it
- Applying updates when they are published
- Backups and knowing how to restore one
- Setup and launch, with documentation rather than a project manager
- Being the person who notices when the site is down
Graduway gives you
- Infrastructure someone else runs and patches
- A contract, an implementation and an escalation path
- A vendor with a track record and referenceable institutions
- One supplier, if you already buy from that group
- A price that has to be requested, and renewed
When you should buy Graduway instead
Four honest cases. If any of them is yours, we would rather you spent the money there than wasted $49 and a term here.
References are part of how you buy
Some institutions cannot, and should not, put an alumni programme on software with no reference customers. We are new. If your committee needs to speak to three peers who already run it, buy the established platform and revisit us in a couple of years.
You already have a contract with the parent company
Adding a product to a supplier you have already onboarded, security reviewed and paid is much cheaper than the sticker price suggests. Our $49 does not include getting through your vendor onboarding process, and that process usually costs more than $49 of staff time.
Nobody will own the server
Self-hosted software without an owner becomes an unpatched application holding personal data. If IT will not take it and no supplier is being paid to look after it, the subscription is the safer purchase even though it costs a hundred times more.
You need the whole thing delivered, not just supplied
There is no implementation service here, no data migration project and no training programme. Support is email and it is included for twelve months. If the requirement is that somebody else does the work, that somebody is not us.
Other comparisons
The rest of the market, written the same way. Full terms are on the pricing page, and every module is listed on the features page.
AlumDeck vs Almabase
Almabase positions itself as a layer on top of an existing CRM, with no public price.
Comparison
AlumDeck vs Hivebrite
The one large platform that publishes pricing, from $895 a month billed annually.
Comparison
AlumDeck vs ToucanTech
A hosted platform for schools and universities, quoted per institution.
Comparison
AlumDeck vs Vaave
An India headquartered platform, rebranded to Hoopstr in March 2026.
Comparison
AlumDeck vs CodeCanyon scripts
Same price class, so the argument is about add-ons, updates and security.
Comparison
What $49 includes
Every module, unlimited members, twelve months of updates and support, and what happens afterwards.
Pricing
Questions people ask when comparing these two
How much does Graduway cost?
There is no published price. Pricing is quoted per institution, and the software review site ITQlick scores its pricing transparency 4 out of 10.
We have not been quoted and we are not going to invent a range. The only way to find out is to ask them, which means a demo and a sales conversation before you see a number.
Does AlumDeck do mentoring the way Graduway does?
AlumDeck includes mentoring with capacity limits, so students and younger alumni can be matched to mentors without one willing volunteer receiving every request.
We are not going to claim a feature-by-feature match against a platform we cannot log into. What AlumDeck does is described on the features page, and if a specific requirement is missing from it, assume it is missing and ask.
Which institutions use AlumDeck?
None yet that we can name, because the product is new and we have no customers to point at. Saying so is more useful to you than a page of invented logos.
What we can show is the software itself: the screenshots on this site are a real install with real content, and the demo page is a screenshot tour rather than a mockup.
What happens to our site if AlumDeck stops trading?
Nothing immediate. You hold the files and the database, the source is not encoded, and there is no licence server that has to approve anything for the site to keep running.
You would stop receiving updates, which matters over time, and any competent Laravel developer could take it from there. That is a materially different failure mode from a hosted platform being switched off.
Two products, two very different institutions
If you have a development office and procurement, buy the platform. If you have one person and a hosting account, $49 gets you the whole thing.
Checkout is opening shortly. Email hello@alumdeck.com for a straight answer about whether this fits, or see the screenshot tour first.